5 Tools to Measure your Twitter Influence

Counting followers on Twitter is like counting pennies – sure, they’ll add up, but how much are they really worth? Follower count doesn’t mean much unless it’s attached to other stats about how influential you are on Twitter, like how often you’re retweeted or replied to. As any Twitter veteran will tell you, influence is a much better measurement of your Twitter effectiveness than follower count – and we’ve got 5 of the best tools to measure your Twitter influence for you.

Most of these influence measures take into consideration factors that include follow count, but also go far beyond it. While follower count can give you a brief at-a-glance view of how popular you are on Twitter, it does nothing to tell you how influential you are with those followers. If everyone is ignoring your tweets, 10 followers doesn’t mean any less than 1,000. Likewise, if you are being retweeted, @mentioned and otherwise interacted with every day, your 100 followers might be more valuable than someone else’s 10,000.

If you only use one influence measure, use Klout. Klout is the gold standard of Twitter influence measurement, and it is a great benchmark for anchoring the other influence measures in this list.

After entering your Twitter username into the box on Klout’s main page, you’ll see a page full of nicely presented stats. The big one, Klout Score, is a number out of 100 that takes over 30 factors into consideration – including your retweet frequency, the influence levels of your followers, and how far your retweets go. Klout will also give you badges for reaching certain milestones, like being listed 10, 100 or 1,000 times. And finally, you can use Klout’s influence matrix to see what type of tweeter you are and adjust your strategy if you so choose.

Klout is also great to take a look at your competition. You can view anyone’s Klout score and analysis simply by typing in their username. So if you want to see just how popular a competitor is, or you are curious about the influence levels of celebs like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, you can check that out too.

PeerIndex is another popular Twitter influence measurement tool. Like Klout, it gives you a PeerIndex score out of 100 that is “a single measure of status” on Twitter. A number above 40 means you’re in the top 10% of Twitter users, and a number above 90 means you’re in the coveted 0.1% of Twitter influencers.

PeerIndex uses activity, authority and audience to measure your total Twitter influence. It also provides you with a topic fingerprint which shows just how influential you are in certain “benchmark” topic, such as sports, politics, science and media.

Retweet rank is perhaps the simplest influence measurement tool on our list, but it’s powerful nonetheless. The amount of times a Twitter account has been retweeted is calculated, and a number displayed based on the rank of that account. So, if you get a retweet rank of 30,000 for instance, that means you are the 30,000th most-retweeted person on Twitter.

Retweet rank also has a leaderboard of the most retweeted people on Twitter, and it will tell you just how you stack up in terms of what percentile you land in.

Just enter your Twitter username and Twitalizer will give you an influence number out of 10. If you’re curious about why you only got a 2.1 but you’ve got 13,000 followers, Twitalizer uses the following to measure your Twitter influence: number of followers; number of unique mentions; frequency of unique retweets; frequency that the user retweets; and frequency of tweets.

Twitalizer will also let you know what type of Twitter influencer you are, which can give you a snapshot of what you need to do to get to the next level.

If you’re used to getting graded like in elementary school, you’ll love Twitter Grader. It gives you a number out of 100 that measures the impact of how you tweet. Like many of the above, it takes follower count into consideration but adds in dozens of other variables to complete its algorithm, including the power of your followers, how frequently you are retweeted and follower to following ratio.

Twitter Grader will also rank you out of all of the Twitter accounts it currently analyzes – and at over 8,000,000, you’ll get a pretty good glimpse into just how you stack up compared to the rest of the Twitterverse.

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